Is Less Really More?

In economics there is a concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns.  It basically states that production and output are not constants and eventually you can only yield so much before production levels drop off or even reverse.  In athletics we have the same issue.  Your body is finite, which means limited, in the amount of training it can handle effectively and each athlete is different in the level they can handle as well.  I often see the over zealous coach who thinks 3-5 hours of practice a day for his athletes is the key to success and blames the athletes when they don't perform well.  It's irrational and irresponsible to attempt to practice that much day in and day out.  Sure, during a camp scenario or various, light dispersed training periods throughout the year you may have a larger chunk of training at one time, but usually that is followed up with a day or two of easy rest/recovery for maximal gains.  Here I have listed a few reasons why you need to train less, as oppose to more:

1) Extended training can raise the level of cortisol (the main hormone that responds to stress including training stress) in your body.  While a little bit of cortisol is a good thing, extended periods of cortisol in your body can lead to becoming unhealthy.  Your body is not designed to be able to handle stress without the recovery periods (remember Matveyev's model).  If you want your athletes to be sick, tired, and weak, train them for 3 hours a day and you'll be headed there in no time.  And one last thing.  Tell your kids that like to sleep 5 hours a night that they already have increased cortisol levels without the training, much less with it.

2) The chance of injury goes up with more training.  Even dismissing how cortisol contributes to injury, just think about how your body is made up of soft tissues.  They get damaged easily.  They repair pretty quickly, but it usually takes a few days to recovery from a very hard training bout.  So basically extended training means your body never fully recovers because it is always under a state of duress.  Usually for the high school athlete, 1-2 days a week off from hard practice can really go a long way, as well as 1-2 days of light training to facilitate recovery via blood flow stimulation.

Over training can affect an athletes ability to perform at a high level.

3) Lastly, and honestly the most obvious, is attention span of the athlete.  Unless your team is social in nature (which usually means being competitive is not the prime focus) it is hard to keep young athletes focused for more than 90 minute.  Excluding announcements or any talks we might give our athletes on the teams I coach, the practices rarely exceed 90 minutes save for one day a week (long workout days might be around 100-105 minutes), and that is from the first step of the warmup to the last step to the car home.  And practice is only that long because we make sure the body is fully warmed up before a workout and spend a long time on the cooldown and stretching after.  The main body of a workout usually lasts for far shorter than that time.  By the time practice is finishing you can already tell athletes are starting to lose focus, so how would you keep kids functioning during a 5  hour practice?

Take some time to reevaluate your training.  Rather than figuring out what to add, try and figure out what you can take out.  Efficiency is key in not just economics, but training as well.